ROUND TABLE REPORT 27
“The whole point about SuDS is to have a multiplicity of features” Sue Illman, Illman Young landscape architects
which work practically but present an eyesore and even a danger for residents. As delegate Matt Clutton from Cameron Homes phrased it in his question to the group, when designing swales for example, “how steep is too steep?”
Sue Illman offered some insight from experience: “What you often get with the engineer’s drawings, is ‘fl at, one in three, fl at,’ which is not so bad, but one in three is steeper than you think when you actually see it on the ground.” Steve Wilson added: “I think you should keep it as shallow as possible, then you can steepen it up if needed, but when you stand at the bottom of something that’s 2.5 metres deep and look at a one in three slope it’s really steep, it’s horrendous.” He continued: “So, the deeper you go, the shallower the sides’ slopes need to be, which is an incentive to keep the depth shallow.”
Matt Clutton offered the developer’s perspective: “It needs a lot of input and collaboration, the ground might be sloping, and one side of the pond might be 2 metres higher than the other, so you need the engineers to model it, and then introduce the landscape architects.”
Conclusion
The Government appears to be sticking to 300,000 homes per year as an ‘aspiration,’ at least, and Labour is pledging to build 1.5 million homes. The pressure is on for new developments across the UK, and on developers, to design sustainable drainage solutions (SuDS) that will reduce the impact of those developments on their local area and beyond, and add amenity. The case for SuDS is clear, they deal with stormwater, clean our water supplies and mitigate the impact of our developments in urban sites. They can also, space permitting, help meet Biodiversity Net Gain requirements and greatly enhance projects for residents. Bringing in the full range of possible solutions (for the full benefi ts) may be a challenge for many, such as SMEs, as the SuDS becomes mandatory in 2024. However, our round table and its recommendations help support the argument for diving fully into the potential to use SuDS to green developments for everyone’s benefi t, and some key practical suggestions. Our event highlighted some remaining gaps in knowledge, including between SuDS afi cionados, and industry clients tackling a raft of intractable problems. However, we think our round table was a valuable part of helping plug those gaps. We didn’t have time to delve further into issues like whether permeable paving should be considered as a ‘natural’ SuDS solution, the quirks of water companies demanding certain unnecessary engineering solutions causing more complexity than is needed, but we hope to return to this key issue for designers in future events. We would like to thank our sponsors, Innovyze, Brett Landscaping and Polypipe Civils and Green Urbanisation for supporting Building Insights LIVE. g
RECOMMENDATIONS FROM THE ROUND TABLE
• Sue Illman, Illman Young landscape architects: “I want to make a plea for using wetlands – they are incredibly diverse and people don’t use them enough. People should use them much more because they fi t your Biodiversity Net Gain, along with your SuDS and attractive landscapes and lots of other things, so you get a big bang for your buck.”
• Chris Carr, Federation of Master Builders: “At the moment we are trying to appease everybody, whether it’s the highways department, water company or anybody else – just have one policy that covers it all, from rain to sea. There’s too much confl ict between external bodies, you’ve got to be a bit more holistic.”
• Steve Wilson, Environmental Protection Group: “Proper multi-disciplinary design, where it’s a partnership, not one discipline being more important than another.”
• Matt Clutton, Cameron Homes: “Education of both customers and planners, where they are segregating out the area that’s public open space from the SuDS – they need to be combined, which will help with the education because people will be going into the feature to use it, and will see the benefi ts.”
• Martin Shaw, Meadfl eet: “The main thing to consider when designing and developing these systems is the lifetime management of them, because they’re a legacy for everyone.”
• Ruth Clarke, Innovyze: “Everyone being involved at the right time in a project – everyone is involved, but whether that gets fed in at the right time, and the bigger picture needs to be looked at – the adoption by any water company is really key.”
• Jamie Gledhill, Brett Landscaping: “Multifunctional design, and incorporating engineering with landscape design – stop calling it ‘engineering SuDS,’ it’s ‘designing SuDS.’ Like Clive Woodward’s approach in England’s successful rugby world cup win in 2003, it’s ‘every one percent that you can add in’ – whatever you can add in, it’s going to be better in the long term.”
• Charlotte Markey, Polypipe Civils and Green Urbanisation: “It’s about how you manage an entire system, it’s helping people transform their practice through manage those complex systems, but they’re not as diffi cult as we think. It’s just having that system approach – if you change something early on, it’s going to have a knock-on effect on something else, and we just need to know where we make the changes and how we challenge them.”
ADF JANUARY 2024
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